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Article: The Energy Charter Treaty Affords
Investor Protections and Right to Arbitration
By Edna Sussman, Hoguet Newman & Regal
LLP, ESussman@hnrlaw.com
The Energy Charter Treaty (the “ECT”)
had its genesis in the ending of the Cold War which offered an
opportunity for mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia
and its many neighbors who needed major investments in their
energy rich resources and the states of western Europe who had
a strategic interest in diversifying their sources of energy.
As stated in Article 2, the ECT “establishes a
legal framework in order to promote long term cooperation in
the energy field”; by
so doing it increases confidence by investors and the financial
community and promotes investment and trade flow among members.
www.encharter.org
Article: NY Addresses Climate Change With the First Mandatory Greenhouse
Gas Program
Published in the New York Bar Association
Journal - May 2006
Today we are doing something about the
weather, to undo what people have done to change it. Spurred by
concerns about climate change and its impacts on the environment
and the economy, the New England/Mid-Atlantic Regional Greenhouse
Gas Initiative (RGGI) is making new ground, by creating the first
mandatory greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program in the United States.
Article: Belated
New Year’s Resolution on Climate Change
Published in the Scarsdale Inquirer
- January, 2006
The buzz in the air
was electric; thousands of people of every nationality gathered
to address what may prove to be our generation’s greatest
challenge: reversing the course we have set on climate change.
Everywhere I turned in the Guy Favreau Complex in Montreal at
the United Nations Climate Change conference in December I was
met by dedicated individuals many of whom have been working for
over a decade on the international climate change framework.
Everywhere I turned I was met with dismay over the United States
position. The United States, which in 2002 (the most recent statistics
available) emitted 24% percent of the world’s carbon dioxide
(CO2) while housing less than 5% of its population, has refused
to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which established a commitment
by virtually every industrialized nation to reduce its green
house gas emissions.
Article: Green
Building: An Overview and Recent Developments
From Trends - American
Bar Association - Edna Sussman, Author
Recognition of the depletion of our natural
resources and the pollution of the planet at the Rio Earth Summit
in 1992 inspired a whole range of sustainability initiatives
in e United States and around the world. Since then. various ways
of measuring sustainability have been developed. The United States
fares poorly in these analyses.
In 2004, Redefining Progress issued
its report on ecological footprints and reported that the United
States expends almost twice its regenerative capacity; moreover,
U.S. consumption per capita exceeds that of any other continent.
Rankings developed for the World Economic Forum to measure overall
progress toward environmental sustainability showed that the
United States ranked 45th worldwide, behind countries ranging from
France,
Australia and Canada to Estonia, Uruguay, Panama, Peru and Namibia.
In the context of this ecological imbalance
as well as the current concerns about energy independence and costs,
the green building
movement in the United States has gained increasing urgency
and momentum.
Recent
Initiatives on Public Lands
By Edna Sussman and Peter
Mostow
The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI)
has been proactively implementing the president’s National
Energy Policy which calls for renewable energy development
on public lands as part of a multi-faceted program to increase
domestic energy
production. DOI manages one in every five acres in the United
States; about 261 million acres of this are administered by
the Bureau
of Land Management (BLM). Pursuant to unit-by-unit plans, the
land is used for multiple purposes including mineral extraction,
logging,
grazing and recreation.
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